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Caption: Debby Kaspari (of Drawing the Motmot) provided this sketch for a seminar of mine in the 90’s, an update of the parable of the blind men and the elephant.

One of my favorite classes is “Principles of Ecology”, a venerably old course at the University of Oklahoma whose structure and focus has long been shaped by the professor in charge that semester.

One of my tweaks to PE in Fall 2017 was the addition of a list of the Ten Principles of Ecology around which to structure the course. This experiment generally paid off, I think, as it gave students ten solid memes to take away at the end of the semester. And there was a bonus: the ten were also a great way to structure PE’s final capstone project. Students have one of three options: 1) write a 500 word letter to the editor, 2) record a 15 minute teaching video aimed at middle school students, or 3) create a work of art. Each should celebrate and makes concrete why knowledge of one of those principles is a good thing.

To my delight, an increasing number of students have been creating art. Moreover, “Option 3” consistently yields some of the most intense and novel work. I’d like to share with you and honor five of those works of art here. The following gallery could easily be three times as long.

The instructions

Create a piece of art that captures one of the ten ecological principles. Create a description of the piece that would hang next to it and that includes the name of the piece, the name of the artist, the date it was created, and a short description of the materials, the process by which you created it, and the principle it was meant to capture.

A Cog in the Moo-chine by Miranda Hannon

“The cow itself was laser etched on a ½ in thick piece of plywood, using a table saw to get the plywood the correct size. The gears were 3D printed out of PLA on a MakerBot Replicator 5th Generation. The wood was lightly stained and the cow was covered in painter’s tape to give contrast. It represents Ecology Principle #3: Organisms are chemical machines that run on energy. While the interior mechanisms may differ, we are all bound by the laws of physics. Most energy ultimately originates from the sun (Principle #2), and organisms are the machines that must process that energy into a format that’s usable for them.”

“This piece represents Principle 8 of the 10 Principles of Ecology that states, “Ecosystems are organized into webs of interactions.” I never realized how important species interactions truly were until taking Principles of Ecology. Measuring and understanding species interactions is one way to determine the health of a biome or ecosystem. Also, the more species interactions there are the more stable an ecosystem is. I used String Art to illustrate species interactions. I would also like to point out that I used slices of wood in this piece. I did this purposely and with meaning. Examining and measuring details in wood slices is a way to determine if a terrestrial biome has been healthy over an extended period of time. Although this piece focuses on the importance of species interactions, the take home message is having healthy biomes and ecosystems through the examination of fine details and organized chaos.”

Materials:

Wood (from the tree cutters at McKinley Elementary School)

Cotton Yarn

Decorative Nails or Tacks

“T” Brackets and Screws

Interactions by Nicole Nguyen

“Acrylic paint was used to first paint the different organisms. The different organisms were then labeled with their name painted on the backs of them. Interaction arrows were also painted with acrylic paint, and the backs of those were also labeled with the type of interaction being shown. All of this was then connected by ribbon. There were three ribbons total, which were then all tied to a rod. Another piece of ribbon was tied to the rod so that this piece of artwork could be hung up. The principle it was meant to capture was principle 7, which states that organisms interact – do things to each other – in ways that influence their abundance.”

The Sunflowers of Life by Bahar Iranpour

“Materials: As an artist, my favorite media to use is paint, specifically oil paints and watercolor. However, oil paintings take up to a week to dry, so I chose to make my project using water colors. I actually prefer using water colors when drawing nature sceneries because I like how light it appears and how easy it is to mix the colors together. It makes the painting look more realistic because nature and our ecosystem is just as mixed in together and intertwined. As you can see in the painting, there is no specific line or division between the flowers and the field, the mountains and the sky. It was my way of showing through the material I chose that everything is complete when together as a whole.

Principle: I chose principle 2– The sun is the ultimate source of energy for most ecosystems. Life runs on carbon rich sugars produced by photosynthesis; every ecosystem’s sugar output depends on how much solar energy and precipitation it receives. I thought this was the most important principle because it serves as the base for all the other principles. If there was no sun, there would essentially be no life, so we would not have any organisms, hierarchies, species interactions, etc that the rest of the principles discuss. The sun allows photosynthesis to occur in plants. These plants are then able to make glucose and grow, which provides food for herbivores. These herbivores eat the plants, grow, and then carnivores come and eat the herbivores. This cycle consistently continues, providing energy to all levels on life.

Process: I definitely wanted to paint a nature scene for the principle I chose. However, I didn’t want to just paint a sun in the middle of my art. I wanted it to be more interpretive. I chose to draw sunflowers because it reminds me of when my mom used a sunflower as an example to teach me about photosynthesis when I was a child. My grandfather always had sunflowers in his garden. I remember my mom pointing out how the sunflowers would position themselves toward the sun in order to obtain its energy and go through photosynthesis. Then at night, the sunflowers would turn around again. This process was very beautiful to me, so I wanted to depict it in my painting. That’s why I drew the sunflowers facing different directions.

This taught me to appreciate the world around me, and how something as simple as the sun does so much for us. I feel that society is so invested in other things, that we take our environment, our sun, etc for granted. One day it may go away, and all life will be gone too. This is why I chose to not make the sun so apparent and clear. I painted a faint, yellow shadow in the middle of the sky, behind the mountains and clouds, to show that the sun is present and providing energy to the plants and flowers in the painting, yet it may go away one day and not be able to provide its energy.

I drew a variety of things like flowers, grasses, plains, shrubs, mountains, water, etc to show that the sun is important to all of these and many more. The small little plants on the mountains and even the small little plants in the water all need the sun’s energy to live. I included a body of water in my painting to also show the importance of water in photosynthesis—water is also needed for photosynthesis to occur. I also wanted the painting to be mostly yellow in order to emphasize the sun and its color, which is why I chose to paint a sunflower field.”

Human. Expansion. Landscape. Permutation. by Sierra Smith

“This piece was intended to capture Principle Nine of the Ten Principles of Ecology. In short, the ninth principle states that humans have an enormous influence on the Earth’s biosphere due to the large population size and technological advances the species has achieved. For hundreds of years, this influence has been used to reshape the Earth’s landscape, scatter species, and destroy diversity. This piece depicts a side by side view of what the natural Earth looks like in comparison to an Earth shaped by humans. To create my piece, I began with a blank, white poster board and used water based, twin tip Fineline Markers. I used these markers to draw the pine trees in addition to the bison and deer herds. Also, these markers were used to outline everything from the roads to the buildings to the mountains. To color everything in I used regular Crayola colored pencils.

I began the process by using the markers to draw the outlines of the buildings and the mountains to establish the two different sides of the piece. Next, I drew the road dividing the sides, and outlined it with the gray marker. Then, I drew all of the trees surrounding the mountains. I made sure to leave a space for the deer and bison herds. There was a more open space left for the bison herd in order to create a prairie environment. I moved on to the city side of the piece by drawing windows on the buildings and coloring them in. The BP building is a representation of a time humans had a detrimental effect on the environment due to the BP oil spill. After this, I drew and colored in the river. The river that runs through the city is a darker shade than the side that runs through the natural environment because of the pollutants and junk that humans release into the water systems, causing murky water. I drew the cargo ship as a representation of one way humans have used the rivers for our advantage. Then, I created the three billboards on the sides of the road. One billboard reads: “IPhone 10 On Sale Now” to signify the advanced technology the human race has developed over time. The next reads: “Land for Sale: 20 acres” which represents the fact that humans will commonly come into a natural environment and change it to their liking, regardless of its effect on the natural life inhabiting the land. The last sign reads: “Eat low fat bison burgers” to depict the human consumption of many animals, including bison. These three signs are representations of common human-imposed environmental change described in Principle 9.”